Beating Plowshares Into Swords: An Alternate History of the Vietnam War (10 page)

While at MAACV I was able to establish our first contacts with the Chinese military command in the North. This went a long way toward easing remaining tensions leftover from the end of the war. It only made sense, considering the fact that there were over 200,000 Chinese troops just over the DMZ, trying to maintain control over the North. I also had the chance to meet with a number of surviving members of Ho Chi Minh’s government who had escaped from their imprisonment by the Chinese and were now seeking to wage a new guerrilla war against them. I was struck by how little bitterness they held toward America, considering how harshly we had waged war against them. Their wrath was reserved for the Chinese, whom they felt had betrayed them. I tried to arrange a meeting with Gen. Giap, who was reportedly organizing resistance to the Chinese out in the bush, but it didn’t come about. I wanted to ask him if he appreciated the irony of the fact that after all of his and Ho’s struggles and triumphs, Vietnam ended up back under foreign domination.

Travis Smith:
I’ve got one question after all this time: If we had the Neutron Bomb from the very beginning, then why did we wait two and a half years to use it on the North Vietnamese? Why couldn’t LBJ and Nixon have used it right in the spring of ‘65 and saved us from having to go through all that shit over there? I’ve read all the books on that war and I don’t care what they claim, it wasn’t the same as when Truman dropped the A-bomb on the Japs. Guys like me had been getting their asses shot off for 24 straight months, but it wasn’t until the politicians and Generals in Washington started feeling the heat that they brought in the big artillery and took care of business. They must have been pissing in their pants at the thought of having all those coffins coming back home in an election year.

Of course I should know better than to get all worked up about it, but it gripes me that so many E-11’s did all the fighting and dying, while somebody else took all the glory. It has been that way in all wars I suppose, but when it’s your war, that little fact of life can be hard to swallow. I still think about all those kids that had to go over there and the men who died in that unnamed valley in Laos. That’s why I didn’t vote for Johnson/Nixon in 1968, my father and brothers could not understand why I wouldn’t support the men who‘d nuked the ‘Cong. I didn’t argue with them, but when I went into the voting booth, I wrote in the names of former Sgt. Hugh Stone for President and former Sgt. Patrick O'Mara for Vice President. Both of them were out of the Army on disability and after all the years they had served their country, it seemed to have no place for them now.
If the White House was going to be the ultimate spoils of the Vietnam War then I figured I’d give my vote to somebody who had earned my respect and needed the job.

Looking back on it, I can see now how incredibly lucky my family had been: my Old Man was at Belleau Wood in 1918 and barely got a scratch; my oldest brother, Eddie, landed at Normandy; the next brother, Ennis, was with Patton and neither one of them got anything more than a nick; brother Bob was a Marine on Iwo Jima and the worst that happened was when his helmet got dinged by a nickel sized piece of shrapnel; my closest brother, Lawrence, landed at Inchon, saw the worst of it at Pork Chop Hill and came back with nothing more than frost bite from the damn Korean winter. I came back whole from the Vietnam campaign, same for Eddie‘s son, George.

We thought about it at the time and then took it all for granted, but luck never lasts, be it good or bad. My family’s good luck ran out with Lawrence’s boy, Lee; his B-52 was shot down over Iran when Reagan carpet bombed that Goddamn miserable country. He ejected in time, but then spent thirteen months as a prisoner of the Ayatollah. My nephew broke both legs when he landed hard in the country outside Teheran and the sons of bitches threw him in a cell, kept him in solitary and didn’t bother to set either leg; Lee spent most of the years since then in a wheelchair.

But the worst of it, at least for me, came twenty seven years to the day after the cease fire in Vietnam was signed; that was the day my oldest son, Travis Jr., took a round through the head outside Potsdam, Germany. He was doing his duty, keeping the starving Russians from overrunning all of Europe; they saved Travis’s life-those Army surgeons had plenty of practice in the intervening years-but it’s been tough row to hoe since then. Travis is doing well now-even married to a nice girl and raising a little boy, but it’s been a long journey, that‘s all I‘ll say.

When I look at that little boy, especially when he’s playing on the floor with the GI Joe I got him last Christmas and I really hope there are no Vietnams in his future.

But I fear.

The End

If you enjoyed this story please take the time to give it a positive review Amazon and Goodreads; being a lifelong history buff, it was a labor of love to write. If you want to simply make a comment, I can be reached on twitter at @Fsnva.

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